POLK COUNTY, Fla. — A local sheriff is calling out big tech companies, saying they’re not doing enough to stop the spread of child pornography.
In late September, Polk County Sheriff’s Office investigators made a major bust, identifying suspects in possession of child pornography that originated from countries all over the world.
“They’re finding everything. They’re finding things that you can’t even conceive of or we can talk about publicly,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. “Two years old, four years old, seven years old, eight years old. This last case we had this guy brought his little girl since she was six over to this other guy for them to batter her while they took videos of it. “
Judd said pictures and videos of Polk County children are being shared by pedophiles all over the world.
“In the last operation, which we just had, we identified five child victims. Five,” Judd said.
The ABC Action News I-Team found that some companies reported millions of cases, while others were hardly reporting any at all. Experts said companies can take additional steps to identify and remove child pornography from their platforms.
Almost as many child porn images reported as children in the U.S.
While most people know little about the proliferation of child pornography, the numbers of reported incidents are huge.
The numbers are shocking… The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates the Cyber Tipline, which tracks reports of child sexual abuse materials.
Last year, the center received 21.7 million reports of child sexual exploitation, almost 60,000 tips a day. It was an increase of 28 percent from the year before.
65.4 million photos and videos were reported last year, almost as many images as the number of children who live in the United States, which is estimated at 73 million.
Most tips come from electronic service providers which include big tech companies like Facebook, Google and Apple. They are required to report known child sexual abuse materials under a federal law enacted in 1999.
“The creation and distribution of this type of material has lifelong effects on these survivors. That is part of the reason we do work with the companies,” said Lindsey Olson, Executive Director of the Exploited Children Divison of NCMEC.
Olson says her organization serves as a clearinghouse, collecting and analyzing data from those electronic service providers, then sending leads to law enforcement.
Each child porn image has a unique code
“The companies that are voluntarily, proactively searching for this type of content on their platform and then removing it and reporting it to the Cyber Tipline are typically are using different types of hashing technology to find that content,” Olson said.
That technology flags previously identified child sexual abuse content when it’s uploaded to file share programs, websites or apps.
Retired U.S. Secret Service Agent Gus Dimitrelos has conducted thousands of child porn investigations over 25 years.
“Anything that’s stored or shared is being hashed by the provider, meaning that a digital fingerprint, a unique fingerprint, is assigned to a file. Understand, there are no two files in the entire universe that have the same hash value,” Dimitrelos said.
Reports generated by the Cyber Tipline identify hash values of known images that have been previously identified.
Different series of photos and images depicting child pornography have been given names based on themes or images in the photo, which can range from “Colored Zebra Case” to “90’s Earrings” to “Ballerina Girl”.
The reports also include the names of officers who worked prior cases involving those images, along with their contact information. Those reports also identify the city, state or country where the images are believed to have been produced.
“We cannot stop it by ourselves. There’s too many ways with technology today, there’s too many ways to hide it,” Judd said.
That’s why Judd said tech companies need to play a bigger role in identifying and removing it.
Facebook: 20.3 million reports, Apple: 265
A report from NCMEC shows not all electronic service providers are reporting at the same level.
Facebook leads the list, sending 20.3 million tips to the Cyber Tipline after identifying known images shared through the social media platform.
“A lot of these people who distribute child pornography will set up an account, a burner account for the purpose of distributing child porn, so it’s up and down in two days, one day, three days. Then it’s gone,” Dimitrelos said.
Other sites are not reporting nearly as many images.
“The law does not require anyone to proactively look for this type of content on their system. It’s really up to each individual company,” Olson said.
Google, which accounts for 90 percent of internet searches, made 546,000 reports. Twitter, with 200 million users, generated just over 65,000 reports. Apple, which has 113 million I-Phone users in the U.S. alone made just 256 reports last year.
“How is it that all of Apple reports 265 against 20 million that Facebook reports? And this one agency, just the sheriff’s office here, has received more NCMEC tips in the first nine months than Apple’s reported?” Judd said.
“The idea is that Apple is on the side of privacy. The device itself doesn’t alert to child porn, it’s only when that file is shared through an electronic service provider, ESP, then the alert happens,” Dimitrelos said.
“We’re not talking about infringing on people’s privacy. People are trusting your system to send data through it. Just peel out the child porn pieces. That’s all you have to do,” Judd said.
Apple updating operating system to detect child pornography
We contacted Apple and they sent us a statement saying the company will soon update its operating system and that “will allow apple to detect known child sex abuse material images stored in I-Cloud photos, which will allow Apple to report these instances to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
The company also says “The messages app will add new tools to warn children and their parents when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos.”
“There’s a finite number of people that deal in this horrific stuff. It’s not a bottomless well. It can be stopped and it could be stopped rather easily by our tech giants who employ tech geniuses,” Judd said.
But some tech geniuses said because there are so many different platforms and tricks pedophiles use; they don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.
“25 years now, have we made a dent? No,” said Dimitrelos. “It’s not going anywhere and it’s getting worse because the ability to store data online has grown exponentially just in the past four years.”
If you have a story you’d like the I-Team to investigate, email us at adam@abcactionnews.com
